Post by MP on Feb 18, 2011 21:08:56 GMT

In Which We ServeDavid Lean & Noel Coward 1942 UKA British Destroyer is torpedoed, and its survivors watch it sink from a raft, also remembering their home lives.Made during the second world war, and nostalgic and propogandistic in equal measure, this starts with disaster - the fatal sinking of a naval Destroyer - and then provides characterisation and poignancy through the flashbacks of three survivors as they await rescue or death on a floating raft. Its assumption that the navy is the unbreaking pride of any country at war - taken alongside the general 'Britannia rules the waves' nationalism - is as romantic as the narratively convenient conceit of having a sailor's wife give birth during the same bomb raid as that in which another's dies. Given its limits, though, there's a fine sense of history being shared in and sweeped along by the masses brought together for a collective cause.